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I am a consultant in service design, innovation and product management. For more than 15 years I worked in product strategy and design leadership in the amazing world of web and mobile media. Before that I was a newspaper journalist and history student. I'm on the web at mattedgar.com.

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Category: experience

On my holiday, I started reading into some topics I ought to know more about: artificial intelligence, genomics, healthcare, and the fast approaching intersection of the above. Here follow some half-baked reckons for your critical appraisal. Please tell me what’s worth digging into more. Also where I’m wrong and what I might be missing.

1. Opening the black box

By Yikrazuul CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘The Gene: An Intimate History’, I discovered the amazing trajectory of human understanding of DNA, RNA, enzymes, proteins, the genome, and the mechanisms by which they interact. There’s no doubt that this stuff will transform – is already transforming – our relationships with medicine. Crucially this generation of scientists are looking inside a black box, where their predecessors could observe its effects but not its inner workings.

At the same time, fuelled by petabytes of readily available data to digest, computer science risks going the other way in the framing of artificial intelligences: moving from explicable, simple systems to ones where it’s allowed to say, “this stuff is so complex that we don’t know how it works. You have to take it on trust.”

When we apply artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare, transparency is essential; black boxes must be considered harmful.

It’s not just me saying this. Here are the words of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE):

“Software engineers should employ black-box software services or components only with extraordinary caution and ethical care, as they tend to produce results that cannot be fully inspected, validated or justified by ordinary means, and thus increase the risk of undetected or unforeseen errors, biases and harms.” — Ethics of Autonomous & Intelligent Systems [PDF]

Transparency must be the order of the day. It comes in (at least) two flavours: the first is clear intent; the second, understandable operation. Both are under threat, and designers have a vital role to play in saving them.

2. The opacity of intent

It’s a commonplace to say that technology is not neutral. I won’t labour that point here because Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Ellen Broad and others do a good job of highlighting how bias becomes embedded, “AI-washed” into seemingly impartial algorithms. As the title of Ellen’s wonderful book has it, AI is ‘Made By Humans’.

That doesn’t seem to stop stock definitions from attempting to wall off AI beyond the purview human control:

“In computer science, AI research is defined as the study of ‘intelligent agents’: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chance of successfully achieving its goals.” — Wikipedia

But what goals exactly? And how did the AI get them? The Wikipedia definition is silent about how goals are set, because, in the words of Professor Margaret Boden, “the computer couldn’t care less.”

“…computers don’t have goals of their own. The fact that a computer is following any goals at all can always be explained with reference to the goals of some human agent. (That’s why responsibility for the actions of AI systems lies with their users, manufacturers and/or retailers – not with the systems themselves.)” — Robot says: Whatever

When any technology moves from pure to applied science, intent must be centre stage. If we fixate too much on the computer science of AI, and not enough on the context of its application, intent will always be unintentionally obscured.

Many discussions about the “ethics” of AI or genomics are really, I think, discussions about the opacity of intent. If we don’t know who’s setting the goals for the machine, or how those goals are derived, how can we know if the intent is good or bad?

Moreover, true human intent may be difficult to encode. In a domain as complex as health and care, intent is rarely straightforward. It can be changing, conflicting and challenging to untangle:

a boy was triaged on first contact as in less urgent need, but has suddenly taken a turn for the worse

an elderly woman wants to get home from hospital, but her doctors need first to be sure she’ll be safe there

the parents want to help their children lose weight, but know that pester power always leads them back to the burger chain.

In these situations, even Moore’s Law is no match for empathy, and actual human care.

3. Designers to the rescue

Design, in Jared Spool’s wonderfully economical definition, is “the rendering of intent.” Intent without rendering gives us a strategy but cannot make it real. Rendering without intent may be fun – may even be fine art – but is, by definition, ineffective.

It’s time for designers to double down on intent, and – let’s be honest – this is not an area where design has always covered itself in glory.

We know what design without intent looks like, right? It’s an endless scroll of screenshots presented without context – the Dribbblisation of design. If you think that was bad, just wait for the Dribbblisation of AI. Or the Dribbblisation of genomics. (“Check out my cool CRISPR hacks gallery, LOL!”)

Thoughtful designers on the other hand can bust their way out of any black box. Even if they’re only called in to work on a small part of a process, they make it their business to understand the situation holistically, from the user’s point of view, and that of the organisation.

Design comes in many specialisms, but experienced designers are confident moving up and down the stack – through graphic design, interaction design and service design problem spaces. Should we point an AI agent at optimising the colour of the “book now” buttons? Or address the capacity bottlenecks in our systems that make appointments hard to find?

One of my team recently talked me through a massive service map they had on their wall. We discussed the complexity in the back-end processes, the push and pull of factors that affected the system. Then, pointing at a particular step of the process: “That’s the point where we could use machine learning, to help clinicians be confident they’re making a good recommendation.” Only by framing the whole service, could they narrow in on a goal that had value to users and could be usefully delegated to AI.

4. How do you know? Show your thinking.

Crucially, designers are well placed to show the workings of their own (and others’) processes, in a way that proponents of black box AI never will.

This is my second flavour of transparency, clarity of operation.

How might we:

communicate probabilities and uncertainties to help someone decide what to do about their disposition to a form of cancer?

show someone exactly how their personal data can be used in research to develop a new treatment?

involve people waiting for treatment in the co-design of a fair process for prioritisation?

In a world of risks and probabilities, not black and white answers, we should look for design patterns and affordances that support people’s understanding and help them take real, fully informed, control of the technologies on offer.

This is not an optional extra. It’s a vital part of the bond of trust on which our public service depends.

5. Designerly machines

Applying fifty iterations of DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs – CC0 MartinThoma

The cultural ascendancy of AI poses both a threat and an opportunity to human-centred design. It moves computers into territory where designers should already be strong: exploration and iteration.

I’m critically optimistic because many features of AI processes look uncannily like a repackaging of classic design technique. These are designerly machines.

Dabbers ready, eyes down…

Finding patterns in a mass of messy data? Check!

Learning from experiments over many iterations? Check!

Sifting competing options according to emerging heuristics? House!

Some diagrams explaining AI processes even resemble mangled re-imaginings of the divergent/convergent pattern in the Design Council’s famous double diamond.

“A diagram outlining a forward pass though our three 3D generative systems.” – Improved Adversarial Systems for 3D Object Generation and Reconstruction [PDF]The threat is that black box AI methods are seen as a substitute for intentional design processes. I’ve heard it suggested that AI could be used to help people navigate a complex website. But if the site’s underlying information architecture is broken, then an intelligent agent will surely just learn the experience of being lost. (Repeat after me: “No AI until we’ve fixed the IA!”)

The opportunity is to pair the machines with designers in the service of better, faster, clearer, more human-centred exploration and iteration.

Increased chatter about AI will bring new more design-like metaphors of rendering that designers should embrace. We should talk more about our processes for discovering and framing problems, generating possible solutions and whittling them down with prototypes and iteration. As a profession, we have a great story to tell.

A resurgent interest in biology, evolution and inheritance might also open up space for conversations about how design solutions evolve in context. Genetic organism, intelligent software agent, or complex public service – we’re all entangled in sociotechnical systems now.

Mick Ward is sick of people trying to sell him electric woks. As chief officer leading transformation and innovation for social care in Leeds, he sees a never-ending procession of providers claiming to solve enduring human problems with expensive, complicated, isolated, digital solutions.

Mick believes we’d do better to start with people and their communities, with their strengths and how they can work together to make things better for themselves. Communities like Seacroft in east Leeds, where the LS14 Trust asked a simple question: “What would happen if we spent a whole year eating together as a community?”

“You can have the healthiest greens on your plate, but if you eat in isolation every day this might not always be good for your long-term wellbeing.” – LS14 Trust video

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to be on a Leeds Digital Festival panel with Mick, Howard Bradley from the LS14 Trust, and Roz Davies from the Good Things Foundation. The event was organised by Victoria Betton from m-Habitat, who has also written up her impressions of the event.

On the agenda, I was there to be the “digital” voice in the conversation as a counterpoint to Mick and Howard’s advocacy of asset-based community development (ABCD). But I also accepted the slot on the panel to listen and learn, because I’ve long had a hunch that ABCD contains much that could improve my practice.

While we digital designers talk a good talk about focusing on people, I can’t help thinking our processes are still too often tilted in favour of electric wok solutions, and too rarely towards things like eating together.

In my contribution to the event, I offered what I hope was a critical description of the principles of a human-centred design process, as set out in the international standard ISO 9241-210:2010. I talked about the good things we always try to maintain:

an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments

users involved throughout design and development

design driven by user-centred evaluation

a process that is iterative

addressing the whole user experience

multidisciplinary skills and perspectives

There need not be a gulf between human-centred design and ABCD, but often, by sins of omission, there is.

The problems start with the deficit-based way we often talk about “user needs.”

Inherently, a user need is a deficit, a thing a user lacks, a gap that we service providers claim to fill with our special expertise. Human nature makes it so easy for us to slip into electric wok thinking: this person is hungry; we make electric woks; what they need is an electric wok.

When the user protests that she never eats stir fry, many of our community double down on this deficit-thinking, by asserting that “people don’t know what they need.” The Henry Ford quote about a faster horse is trotted out, or something about how Apple don’t do user research (He never said it; they do.)

Human-centred design theory emphasises that we don’t take people’s stated desires at face value. We say no to that market research staple, the focus group. Instead, we uncover latent needs using ergonomic and ethnographic observations of actual behaviour (“Saturday, 1:27am: Participant orders takeaway chicken chow mein.”)

Rushed or done badly, such approaches render the research participant little more than a lab rat. The experimental subject’s only stake in the transaction is a shopping voucher to thank them for an hour of bemusement that they’ll never get back.

Empathy is essential in any human-centred design process. The trouble is, we often get it muddled up with sympathy.

When we see someone in pain, or with problems, or less fortunate than ourselves, our instinct is to help them. That’s a brilliant human thing. It’s mark of a civilised society that we have a safety net, no questions asked, to pick up a person when they’re knocked off their bike or floored by acute illness.

Still from ‘Your Very Good Health’ – Central Office of Information, 1948

Once the initial crisis has passed, however, sympathy must give way to a fuller understanding of the person and their capacity to recover. True empathy means feeling their hopes for the future, the things that make them resilient, knowing which activity they’ll enjoy the most to rebuild wasted muscles.

The factors that make someone strong are so personal and so varied that they are often forgotten in the focus on what’s commonly wrong. And in the name of equality, “not everyone has capacity” becomes a reason to ignore the assets of those who do. It’s then only a short step from fixing the problem to fixing the person, applying the faulty logic that if we are well, then making them more like us will make them well too. True empathy takes people as they are, not as we wish them to be.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but human-centred design has become, by default, individualistic.

There is a rich heritage of more social strains of service design and participatory design. In recent years, these have been drowned out by digital user experiences, where the context of use is invariably a person alone at a computer or on their personal mobile device.

Reacting against the phoney seance of the focus group, we prefer one-to-one usability sessions and depth interviews. To drive out ambiguity, we write user stories in the singular: “As a user, I want to… so that…”.

When we over-rely on these methods, we miss the plethora of relationships beyond the individual user and service provider. When we think about inclusion and accessibility, we fail even to ask users whether they consider it more “independent” to complete a task alone with assistance from a service provider, or by sharing it with a family member or friend.

Finally, as a questioner at the event pointed out, the language around this stuff has always been problematic.

We borrow the words of marketing “activation” as if people were machines waiting to be switched on. I work in a portfolio dedicated to “empowering people”, but who are we to give power in the first place? How about “stop disempowering people!”

Extract from 1948 booklet ‘The New National Health Service’

I take consolation from the fact that a 1948 leaflet on the new National Health Service places the word ‘consumers’ of healthcare in scare quotes, as if our founders knew the word was unsatisfactory, and that sooner of later someone would come along with a better term. 70 years later, we’re still working on that.

I ended my discussion by posing two related questions:

How might we move beyond purely transactional models of provider and consumer to more fluid configurations of actors, in which all contribute to and take from the service according to their needs, wants and abilities?

How might we (especially those of us charged with making digital services at national scale) recognise that service is co-created and co-produced in communities, and provide platforms for those communities to discover, express and meet their own needs?

We can stick to our principles of human-centred design, but we need to broaden their interpretation.

ABCD reminds us to consider user assets at least as much as user needs.

User research should includeeveryone as equals, helping them to beneficially articulate things they do know at some level, but have not yet consciously considered. Only then can they become active participants in the co-design of solutions that suit them.

Asset mapping is a common research activity in the ABCD world, but Mick from the council is very clear: the asset maps aren’t for him, they’re for the community, to realise what they already have. And when they’re made in a participatory way, the assets they surface are very different from the usual libraries and sports centres that turn up on maps made by the service providers.

I was recently challenged about user needs in a learning context, where people literally “don’t know what they don’t know”. Yet learners do know many other things that are highly relevant to the design of their learning, such as what they know already, how they will fit learning into their everyday lives, and what they hope to achieve with their new knowledge and skills.

The whole user experience is situated at least as much in places and communities as in individuals, devices and service providers.

Beyond the place-based work of community development, there are some promising developments in the digital world.

The always insightful Cassie Robinson at Doteveryone is thinking with Citizens Advice about collective action:

Collective action is a strand of work we’re committing more time to over the coming months at Doteveryone, discovering other opportunities and contexts where collective action can play a role in scrutiny, accountability and influencing change. As part of this work we are also looking to civil society organisations to take a role in empowering the public and their audiences to take collective action in directing the impacts of technology on our lives.

Projects by If’s new report with the Open Data Institute considers some of the many instances when organisations deal with data about multiple people:

Services that allow data portability need to consider social relationships to ensure they are respectful of people’s rights. It’s also important that services don’t make assumptions about how groups make decisions about moving data: instead, they need to allow people the time, space and awareness to work things out for themselves.

Users must be involved throughout design and development in more than one way:

as participants in user research specified by the Government Digital Service

as fully fledged members of a multidisciplinary team, for example by bringing experts by experience onto Care Quality Commission inspections.

While many organisations employ people in one of these modes, very few yet combine all three. This means false conflicts are set up. User researchers complain that consultations are conducted with “proxy users” instead of the actual people who will use a service. The most committed service users, with much to contribute, can be told their experience disqualifies them because “they know too much”. In truth, we need them all!

If we want fewer electric woks in our future, we’d better stay open to unexpected outcomes.

Howard described compellingly how the LS14 Trust works to “hold spaces” where people can explore and create at their own pace – “laptop in one hand, cup of tea in the other”. They start conversations on people’s own terms, asking “what do you want to change?”

As a question from Victoria highlighted, we must always be aware of power imbalances in these spaces. People will be inhibited from contributing fully if they feel they should say what the most powerful people in the room want to hear, or if, on the basis of their past experiences, they don’t believe their participation will really change anything.

And Mick shared a set of questions that ABCD practitioners use to check the impact of their interventions:

Today, for me, marks a decade of 140 character updates, 10 years of paying continuous partial attention to hundreds of wonderful people around the world. So I downloaded my Twitter archive and munged it in an Excel pivot table. Here’s what I learned…

2006-2008: what are you doing?

Following just a handful of people, I first experienced Twitter as a text messaging service. SMS, remember that? Every message was an answer to a single, simple question: “What are you doing?”

Within a week I think I understood the archival potential…

Considers the possibility that in years to come my children may leaf through these twitterings like so many faded photographs.

“the places whose main or only selling point is unspoiltness – places we go to witness or take part in something special, but just by being there we destroy whatever that quality was. The perfect village? The perfect bar? Twitter?” – blog post: Polperro

Along the way, I picked up on the emerging conventions of the platform…

“Maybe it’s this merging of monologue and dialogue in one service that makes microblogging (or whatever you call it) so powerful a communications tool? One for those of us who, most of the time, are not very good at listening?” – Twitter: where monologues collide

Up to that point, I’d used Twitter to keep up with a particular group of remote friends and colleagues. In 2009, as I recall, the number of users in Leeds hit some kind of critical mass – it became a useful place for conversation about my home city.

In November that year, after a chance Twitter exchange, I lured the author Steven Johnson to Leeds to talk about a personal hero of mine, Joseph Priestley. It rained, and not that many people made it to the talk, but even so…

It’s far from perfect. Nervous of Twitter’s long-term future, quite a few of us tried to find more open alternatives. I managed 246 identi.ca updates before getting sucked back into the Twitter ecosystem. This single point of control in our communications infrastructure still makes me uneasy.

2012: Unfollowing all the brands and bots

“A few days ago I ran a critical index finger down my Twitter “friends” list, unfollowing a few dozen accounts that did not belong to real people… I’m delighted with the results: my Twitter feed suddenly feels so much more human.” – All brands must die (after a long and happy life)

Since then I’ve kept this rule. Sorry, brands and bots, if you have something interesting to say, I’m sure one of my real friends will pass it on.

In 2012, I left a well-paid, permanent job to freelance in the world of digital service design. I’m pretty sure those people, the people I follow, and who follow me back, made that possible.

Being myself, most of the time

Part of the privilege that comes with playing life on the lowest difficulty setting is being able to be myself on social media, without the need to compartmentalise or anonymise for fear of context collapse. I’ve never felt the need to separate personal and professional identities or to create a closed account for family and friends. I am painfully aware that many others do not enjoy this freedom.

At the same time, Twitter’s liberal approach to multiple accounts and usernames has allowed me to play with the medium. I once spent a few months impersonating the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins, mainly to improve my French language skills…

2016: Meet my awesome filter bubble

Over the years the number of people I follow has grown. There are just so many interesting people in the world. But analysing my tweets I found a core of about 30 people whose words I retweet time and again.

I made them into a list, and for the past few days I’ve been consulting this instead of checking my timeline. So far I’m liking the result. By sticking just to this list, I can have a sense of completion, without getting drawn into the endless duration of the infinite scroll.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past weeks and months about whether filter bubbles are a Bad Thing, the cause of mutual mistrust across seemingly unbridgeable divides. My take: everyone needs a filter bubble. How awful would life be without like-minded people to share and reinforce beliefs and interests? Twitter’s asymmetrical follower model and untampered timeline have afforded the possibility of curating my filter bubble in a more controlled and transparent way than other social media platforms. I hope they keep those features. The risk arises when we mistake that bubble for the whole world, with everyone outside it as the Other.

This is my personal filter bubble. Sometimes I need to step outside it, but it’s an awesome bubble to be in. Thank you all…

Many others, not on this list, have also contributed to making Twitter great for me – thank you too.

In fact, in 10 years of following fairly liberally, only twice have I unfollowed someone because their ragey tweets were polluting my timeline. Again, I am aware that others have far worse online experiences. Some of the people whose tweets I have most enjoyed are no longer on Twitter. That’s a terrible shame. The platform’s owners and users must work harder to make it a safe place.

“In Elizabethan amphitheatres, like the 1599 Globe Theatre, performances took place in ‘shared light’. Under such conditions, actors and audiences would be able to see each other… This attention to a key original playing condition of Shakespeare’s theatre enables the actors to play ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ or ‘at’ audiences. Actors therefore develop their ability to give and take focus using voice, gesture and movement.” — Emma Rice to Step Down From London’s Shakespeare’s Globe, Playbill, Oct 25, 2016

Early, too early, one morning I blunder into a railway station Starbucks for a coffee and croissant to take onto the train. I’m the only customer. I place my order and shuffle along to the end of the counter where the barista will hand down my drink.

What happens next in the customer experience is critically important. We know that Starbucks knows this too, because of a leaked 2007 memo from chairman Howard Schultz, in which he bemoaned the commoditisation of his brand:

“For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista.”

As I said, it was early, much too early for an intimate experience with a barista. And in any case, the barista was still learning the ropes. I guess first thing on a shift, when there’s one customer and no queue, is a great time for some coaching from the supervisor. This is what I heard him say:

“You have 23 seconds for the milk… Oh, and relax. You can’t concentrate when you’re stressed.”

23 seconds! That’s what removed the romance from my coffee.

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanise them.” — John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic

Some things in this carefully commodified service experience were never meant to be seen by the customer. When they do burst into view, it feels wrong, uncanny.

In this post I want to explore the reasons for that uncanniness, and how we might play with it to develop new service opportunities. Is it really so obvious what should and should not be visible to the user? What’s the impact on users when a component slips out of sight? And how might we make service better by keeping more things, more visible for longer?

The line of visibility

The line of visibility is a well-known concept in the fields of customer experience management and service design. To use, like Howard Schultz, a theatrical metaphor, it divides the service blueprint into front-stage activities seen by the customer, and back-stage ones unseen by the customer but nonetheless essential to the delivery of the service.

In the coffee shop:

Front-stage: the theatre and romance of taking the order, writing the customer’s name on a cup, grinding the beans, making the coffee, presenting the coffee to the customer

At first glance, the allocation of activities to front or back-stage appears uncontroversial. In reality, it is much murkier, and deserves more critical attention:

A restaurant might make a show of fresh food preparation with an open kitchen on full view to the diners, but still have a room behind the scenes for the freezers and dishwashers.

Recently, after returning a hire car, I was given a lift by a new member of staff. The conversation we had about the rental company’s graduate scheme made me warm to the company and more likely to return.

Visibility and the value chain

I’ve been thinking about visibility in the context of whole value chain maps. In his mapping technique, Simon Wardley arranges components from the most visible user needs at the top to the unseen at the bottom:

In this interpretation, visibility is said to recede as we traverse the network – the more “hops” away from the customer, the less it needs to concern them. But is that really true?

Invisible things can have very visible effects. Amazon’s recommendation engine is deeply buried in the company’s infrastructure, yet customers experience its insights and biases every time they use the site.

Visible things may get up to all sorts of unseen activities. What if that camera or video recorder in the corner is participating in a distributed denial of service attack right now?

Invisibility and commodification

Why is it that some things naturally seem to merit visibility while others have to hide themselves from view?

I think it has to do with commodification. To turn something into a commodity is to take it out of its context, to make it fungible so that it can be substituted, traded and transferred. In an example by the philosopher Andrew Feenberg:

a tree is cut down and stripped of its branches and bark to be cut into lumber. All its connections to other elements of nature except those relevant to its place in construction are eliminated.

This is what people are doing when they commit metaphorical sleights of hand such as “data is the new oil“. They take something that has deep meaning to an individual and, by aggregation, transform it into something that can be traded without further challenge or debate.

The logic of commodification prohibits the end user from interest in, or influence over, anything but the surface-level components. Before we know it, any breach of the line of visibility feels illegitimate. From Fairtrade foodstuffs to the employment rights of Uber drivers, demands to deepen visibility into the supply chain come to be seen as “political” incursions in the supposedly rational domains of technological production and economics.

Unregulated, the behemoths of the attention economy would place all their tracking of users below the line of visibility. “Users don’t need to know about that stuff,” they’d say. “It’s technical detail. Nothing to worry about. Move along now.” The Jobsterbedunners might even hold up web users’ continued browsing of sites in such compromised circumstances as some kind of “revealed preference” for covert tracking.

But people who care about privacy have a different opinion on where the line should be drawn. Their only option is a “political” intervention to drag the publicity-shy cookie blinking over the line of visibility. Now Europe’s internautes can take back control, every time they visit a website. Say what you like about the implementation, but we Brits will miss those privacy protections when they’re gone.

Shared light

What if there was another way to realise value? One that didn’t depend on enclosing the value chain by making it opaque to end users?

To Feenberg, decontextualisation is “primary instrumentalisation” the first part of a two-step process:

The primary instrumentalisation initiates the process of world making by de-worlding its objects in order to reveal affordances. It tears them out of their original contexts and exposes them to analysis and manipulation while positioning the technical subject for distanced control…

But the story doesn’t end there. There’s a crucial, secondary step where visibility has to be re-established:

At the secondary level, technical objects are integrated with each other as the basis of a way of life. The primary level simplifies objects for incorporation into a device, while the secondary level integrates the simplified objects to a social environment.

Through this secondary instrumentalisation, this resource integration, users tell us what they want technology to be. Think, for example, of the camera-phone as a concept worn smooth by countless buying and use decision over the course of a decade. This part of the value creation process cannot happen in strategy and planning; it can only happen in use.

Premature commodification would close down such possibilities just when we ought to be keeping our options open. Co-creation, on the other hand, places the service user, the service designer, and the service provider on the same side – and all of us play in all those positions at one time or another.

We maximise value when the interests of all the actors are aligned, when asymmetries of knowledge between them are reduced. To borrow another controversial theatrical analogy, co-creation flourishes in “shared light” when actors and audiences can see each other equally.

Not only do we see the coffee being made, we see the staff being trained.

We are no longer passive recipients of the recommendation algorithm, we can understand why and how it behaves.

Some service design patterns

Here are just some of the patterns that play with the line of visibility. By making things visible, they make things better.

Seeing over the next hill: We meet much of the most valuable service when facing a change or challenge for the first time. But unless we know what to expect, it’s hard for us to make decisions in our best interests, or to trust others seeking to support us. Deliver service so that people can always see over the next hill, so they know what to expect, what good looks like, and who they can trust to help them along the journey.

Provenance: People can take reflective pride in where their things come from – and be repulsed by a supply chain’s dirty secrets. Design like they’re watching. Document the journey and make it part of the service. My Fairphone may have been a little pricier than an equivalent smartphone, but it comes with a story of fair materials, good working conditions, reuse and recycling.

Individualisation: Service is intrinsically full of variation. When we treat its delivery like factory mass production, we make it inflexible, unresponsive, and ultimately destructive of value. Anticipate variation, embrace it and celebrate it. This will likely means fewer targets and processes, more self-organising, empowered teams. Be like homecare organisation Buurtzorg, which prioritises “humanity over bureaucracy” and “maximises patients’ independence through training in self-care and creation of networks of neighbourhood resources.”

A last word from actor-network theorist Michel Callon in his afterword to Feenberg’s ‘Between Reason and Experience’:

“Keeping the future open by refraining from making irrevocable decisions that one could eventually regret, requires vigilance, reflection, and sagacity at all times. Politics, as the art of preserving the possibility of choices and debate on those choices, is therefore at the heart of technological dynamics.”

Among my favourite times working at Orange – and there were many – was the chance to lead the UK organisation’s design and usability team, doing user-centred design across the mobile and broadband business units.

At the start of the assignment I talked with heads of all the teams whose services we worked on, to understand what was going well and what, not so well. Two divergent patterns emerged.

Managers whose services were performing highly praised our responsiveness. They liked how designers could blend into their teams without the bureaucracy that bedevilled some other parts of the organisation. These were also the services where Design and Usability made the biggest difference. We were involved early, consulted often, and tuned in to their priorities.

The not-so-happy on the other hand, expected our work to be more transactional. They would involve design late, with precise requirements and arbitrary timelines. Their instinctive reaction when things were going wrong was to impose an even tighter rein.

And therein lay the problem: far from making things better, all the added controls would drag us even further away from the conditions that correlated most highly with success.

What high-performing teams had found – and struggling ones were missing – was a magical quality I’ve come to understand as “productive informality” – spontaneous, personal, and collaborating as equals.

I wrote about this a while ago in my post about digital transformation. In productive informality we see less forward planning, more ambient awareness, and the levelling effect of information abundance.

This post is an attempt to unpack that quality, to explain to myself as much as to you, dear reader, why those two words belong together. But first I need to define what I have in mind by productivity, and how we can think about it in a service-dominant world.

Productivity

When we talk about “productivity” in a general economic sense we mean the rate of output per unit of input. Dictionary example: “workers have boosted productivity by 30 per cent.”

You probably picture productivity as identical widgets rolling smoothly off some some sort of production line, so dominant is the manufacturing metaphor in our economy. But most of what we do at work isn’t like that at all: it’s service.

Productivity in service is infinitely variable. This means that optimising for repeatable, well-known processes with narrow tolerance is actually the fastest way to leave value lying on the table.

Instead we have to tune in to the needs of customers, no two of whom are alike. Only through continuous, informal communication can we discern and meet the full, diverse, messy, constantly shifting range of customer needs. Great service demands tolerance and curiosity.

Listen to the words of Jos de Blok, of home care organisation Buurtzorg Nederland, a poster child for people-centred health and care:

“I believe in client-centered care, with nursing that is independent and collaborative. The community-based nurse should have a central role – after all they know best how they can support specific circumstances for the client.”

Recently, applying for a place on a government framework contract, we were asked to affirm that we “ensure consistent delivery of quality to our customers”. So now Stick People has a quality policy. It goes like this:

We’re a service business. We understand quality as a moving target, defined and re-defined by our customers’ changing expectations, perceptions and experiences. To succeed we’ll have to consistently question and improve the way we work:

focusing and framing a better understanding of customers’ capabilities and needs

translating that understanding into clear agreements to work with them

keeping our promises and earning their trust

making work visible and inspecting progress

adopting and inventing better ways of working

closing every engagement to our own and our customers’ satisfaction.

As someone once said, the strategy is delivery. Only when we start to deliver, do we earn the trust that enables us to deliver more.

Informality

Like the butterfly at the top of this post, informality is impossible to pin down without fatal consequences. But this much we know: informality grows from trust.

Informality has, of course, always greased the wheels of business – and more so at the highest levels – the camaraderie of the boardroom, of the golf course, of Tony Blair’s “sofa government”.

Neither is it a novel insight that great groups operate informally. Take Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman in ‘Organising Genius‘:

Great Groups tend to be less bureaucratic than ordinary ones. Terribly talented people often have little tolerance for less talented middle managers. Great Groups tend to be structured, not according to title, but according to role. The person who is best able to do some essential task does it.

No matter how much we benefit from it inside an organisation, sometimes it’s scary to allow informality into the open. Exhibit this Alphagov Github commit:

Removed para about using cuddly toys and fruit as props in meetings.
Removed this para as it deviates from the authoritative tone. Some users may not find this puts GDS in a suitable light:
To stop your meetings from becoming repetitive, have an object that you (gently) throw to someone to signify they should speak next. Pick people at random - it keeps people on their toes and lets the person speaking to choose the person they wish to hear from next. At GDS we use cuddly toys or a piece of fruit. It’s a bit of fun. You don’t have to this - it’s just something to experiment with.

The pattern

I believe productive informality is more than nice to have: it forms a virtuous circle that we can turn to our advantage:

Boldness and humanity

I’ve always been drawn to boldness. I find boldness in others inspiring, infectious, empowering, creative and meaningful. I want to spend time around bold, honest, open people. I want to be inspired and empowered to boldness myself. I know I am at my best when I can feel the weird whoosh of terror and relief that comes from real, heartfelt boldness. And I don’t think you can lead a great team, or transform organisations or services without a healthy amount of boldness.

One thing that is already different is that what you are reading, hopefully, doesn’t feel like a council document for consultation. It is written in the voice of a person not an organisation and not just the foreword. This voice is the voice of Leanne Buchan: Council worker; Human with ideas and opinions; Sometimes gets it right, sometimes gets it wrong.

You’ll hear bold, human voices like these wherever good work is going on. People working at pace, making good progress, don’t need to dress up their words with technical jargon or commercial buzzwords. They have no fear of a burning platform. The way they talk about their work in their own natural voice is a sign of intrinsic pleasure from doing good work.

The anti-pattern

I reckon we should always stand our ground on cuddly toys and fruit lest the virtuous circle turns into a vicious one:

Poor performance leads to demands for tighter formal control. And so on…

Start down this road and before we know it the good principles of the Agile Manifesto will be smothered in the cakewreck of so-called “best practice” (the very presumption of claiming that this is as good as it gets!) …

Call to arms

Productive informality might just be a critical dividing line for our time.

There’s a growing impatience and disillusionment with the old ways of working. We are fed up with convoluted contracts. We reject processes structured around organisations not users. We are less enamoured of the arcane ways of parliament and political parties.

Many of the issues that anger people today seem to me to come down to unfair distribution of access to informality. Uber is criticised when it treats drivers with a harshness inconsistent with its brand for riders. Small businesses demand that HMRC cut them the same slack that it appears to offer to Google, Vodafone and Starbucks.

We are at a crossroads where digital technology can be used to enhance or extinguish informal ways of working – to promote spontaneity or enforce process conformance. As makers with that technology, whose side are we on?

In the industrial England of the 1810s, the Luddites destroyed machines that threatened their way of work and life. Contrary to popular belief, they were not against all machines. Their complaints were more nuanced, understanding all too well the relationship between technology and social change. In the words of their fictional figurehead Ned Ludd:

“We will never lay down our Arms… [until] the House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality,”

And so 200 years later, this is our demand: put down all behaviour hurtful to informality!

Without exception, everyone I meet in the public sector wants to help make their service better. Most of them are in some way frustrated. The domain is massive and the activities disjointed. People engaged in any given service – from users and frontline workers down to managers and policymakers – can go for months on end without coming into contact with each other. On the rare occasions they do meet, they generally do so with mutual incomprehension.

This is not exclusively a government problem. I know from my time as a product manager in the private sector that a similar malaise affects all big organisations. But when it happens in government the impact of poor service is graver. This is service delivered with the authority of the state. As users we cannot take our government custom elsewhere. Neither can public service providers cherry pick their customers like the private sector does.

Whether we realise or not, most of government is mostly service design most of the time. If we fail to acknowledge this, we’re doomed to short change our citizens and fall short of our policy goals. But when we wake up to the potential, we find proven tools and techniques for designing service. Applying them can and should be everyone’s business.

We only have to look at definitions of “government” and “service design” to find a naturally good fit.

Exhibit A: The Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor summarises the business of government under the following headings:

the resources available to government (ministers, money, civil servants)

how government manages them (through arm’s-length bodies or contracting), what it does with them (passing legislation, answering requests for information) and how it measures what it does (major projects, permanent secretary objectives), and

what impact all of that has in the real world and how the public and international studies rate government effectiveness.

“Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.”

We may call it many things, but service design happens all the time at every level of the government stack. The problem is that when done unconsciously it’s just not very good. All of the following contain random acts of design by default…

Users work their way around complex government processes, even if it means hiring costly experts like lawyers or accountants to do it for them.

Frontline staff hack the process just so they can serve their customers better. Visit any contact centre to see tattered papers, sticky notes by screens, Dymo-labelled folders and trays put in place to expedite information from one part of the process to another.

Good managers manage with ingenuity to sort out shift patterns, holiday rotas and flexible working so that their people can do their best work – in spite of policies and processes that treat workers more as resources than as human beings.

Entire, organisations-within-organisations accrete with baroque titles such as “change management” to drive through discontinuous re-structures that fracture working relationships and frustrate any long-term organisational learning.

“Policy” is a Platonic conception perceived to exist on a higher plane where users are always rational, processes run smoothly and every day is a sunny one. By the time we descend to the grubby depths of “implementation” it’s already too late.

Our democracy itself still runs on rails laid in Victorian times, as if the population were barely literate onlookers and the parties the houses of a minor public school on a bad-tempered match day.

All 5 gaps are endemic in public service. Design shouldn’t just be used to paper over them: it can eliminate them altogether. As Tom Loosemore said in his Code for America talk last year describing the Government Digital Service’s approach:

“We don’t talk about policy and implementation or policy and then delivery. We don’t think of them as two separate things. Even thinking how you fix the gap is a category error. What we are doing here collectively, with policy people in the room, is digital service design.”

(Disclosure: It’s my privilege to work as a contractor for GDS, though like everything on this blog I write this in a personal capacity.)

Let’s look at those gaps again.

Gap between what customers expect and what managers think they expect. We seek and expose user insights, not just at the start or end of the process, but throughout. There’s good evidence that everyone on the team should spend at least 2 hours every 6 weeks observing primary, qualitative research. How about we make that a prerequisite for Permanent Secretaries, council CEOs, and everyone else not in direct day-to-day contact with service users?

Gap between management perception and service specification. Even when we understand what users need, we have to get better at translating that insight into a vision of the service. We can use powerful formats such as user stories to tie requirements back to users and their goals. The best specifications of all can be real working prototypes. Making prototypes is easier than ever.

Gap between specification and delivery. Alpha and beta versions are what we use to close this gap. They help us understand the ins and outs of delivery even as we refine our designs.

Gap between promise to customers and what’s actually delivered. Ever been sold a Tesla only to find it’s a Sinclair C5? In the words of this tweet, “how could we get Britain voting on prototypes rather than promises?”

Gap between what customers expect of service and how they actually perceive it. This yawning chasm is the cumulative effect of gaps 1 to 4. It is also the main driver of disappointment and distrust in public services. One bad experience loops back round and poisons our expectations of future interactions with government – a downward spiral that we need to disrupt.

How can we make government better? By accepting that first and foremost everyone’s a designer, and that we all need to develop a design thinking sensibility.

Service design is visual. This doesn’t mean you have to be great at drawing – but it does demand working with more than words. When we draw pictures and diagrams we engage a different part of our brains and spot things we would miss through written specification alone. Making those assets visible can feel scary at first. That’s worth it though, because they change the conversation into something much more constructive than any amount of finessing verbal positions and semantics.

Service design is multidisciplinary.ISO 9241-210, the international standard for human-centred design acknowledges that no one discipline has a monopoly on design. Rather, “the design team includes multidisciplinary skills and perspectives.” This is a challenge to a silo-ed way of working, but small “two-pizza” teams in startups and internet giants like Amazon and Google prove it can be done.

Service design is holistic and integrative. Good designers of any stripe look at the big picture – what is the user need? what is the policy intent? – but they don’t stop there. They also dive down into the details and forge novel combinations of components. They hold multiple, potentially contradictory, strands in tension, zooming in and out between the reasons for doing something and the details of delivery that will make it succeed.

Service design is iterative. Whenever I read an account of Apple’s development process I am struck by the number of versions and iterations their products and services go through. They create and test many ideas before narrowing down on a handful to develop further. Just at the point when lesser companies would settle and launch they throw all the cards in the air and create yet more new combinations.

Finally, service design treats time as a material. There’s a place for thinking and working fast, and one for being slow and considered. A food bank user needs assistance before the next mealtime while a retiree of 60 needs to think what money they might need aged 100. Big service providers get stuck too easily in the middle of Stewart Brand’s pace layers. Service design helps them to be more supple.

Don’t believe me? Try this stuff out for yourself. In June I’m taking part in the Global GovJam. It’s not a ‘designers’ event, just people designing together. For 48 hours we break down silos between local and national government, the NHS and social care, public, private and third sectors. We challenge people to communicate their ideas through doing, not talking. They make prototypes and take them out to potential users when they still feel incomplete. And the buzz as people realise how much they can achieve in so little time is amazing. Come and join us in Leeds or in dozens of other cities around the world.